The real specialty here is fresh seafood, expertly grilled over a wood fire and served simply at affordable prices.
By: Kate and Tom O’Neill
Bright umbrellas and picnic tables cluster around a building
reminiscent of a pier-side lobster pound on the New England coast, but this one
is on Central Avenue in Flemington, tucked between clusters of retail outlets.
The Blue Fish Grill, open since May, does offer a lobster roll ($7.95), but the
real specialty is fresh seafood, expertly grilled over a wood fire and served
simply at affordable prices. The brief menu offers something to tempt every seafood
lover, but also provides a marinated skirt steak ($10.35) or burger ($8.95) for
unabashed carnivores. This new, casual dining spot is the creation of Matt McPherson
and Matt Green, two young chefs who have made an impressive success of their nearby,
elegant townhouse bistro, Matt’s Red Rooster Grill.
|
Blue Fish Grill |
On the night we visited too chilly for the outside picnic benches we sat inside at one of about a dozen tables. One wall was painted a nautical blue and hung with a few wooden stars painted gold. The ambience is "seaside basic": a roll of paper towels on a shiny chrome stand serves as the centerpiece on each table, plastic plates, flatware wrapped in a napkin, a cooler with soft drinks and bottled waters near the entrance, and a self-serve freezer stocked with ice cream.
The regular menu offers six different grilled fish each comes with the diner’s choice of sauce and side dishes along with soups, salads and sandwiches, including a crabcake ($8.95). In addition, several specials were listed on a blackboard: crispy calamari ($4.95), diver scallops ($11.95), spicy shrimp kebob ($8.95) and blackened catfish ($7.95). Portions are smaller than what some may expect. Most of the grilled fish slices are about a quarter pound. These moderate portions, says Chef McPherson, jibe with the Blue Fish philosophy: to serve healthful, speedily prepared food that is cooked to order, high quality and affordable.
Guests place their orders and pay at a window leading to the kitchen. Take-out is a large part of the Blue Fish business but, for those who stay to eat, pleasant servers deliver orders to the table. They know the menu well and arrange wine glasses and an ice bucket for those who bring their own wine.
We ordered a wide variety of items to allow a broad assessment of the menu. This, we learned, is not the usual way. Guests generally order one course at the window and then go back and order more if they’re still hungry. In our case, the fast-moving kitchen produced the main course just as we were settling in with our starters. Our server gladly returned the entrées to the kitchen, but unfortunately some items were merely warm by the time we were ready for them.
The dull bluefish salad ($4.95) puzzled us at first, since there was no bluefish in it. Then we realized it was named for the restaurant, not for the fish. Chopped napa cabbage, mango, crispy wonton strips and candied pecans were dressed with a low profile Asian vinaigrette. The generous serving of calamari, ordered as an appetizer, could make a satisfying entrée. Served in a basket, batter-dipped morsels were crisp-fried on the outside, firm and tender inside fine examples of this seaside, guilty pleasure.
We enjoyed three of the grilled fish offerings. Hawaiian butterfish ($7.75) was one of the dishes that reached room temperature before we got to it, but was still flavorful, moist and smoky from the wood grilling. It was accompanied by a tasty, piping hot, twice-baked cheddar potato. Halibut ($8.95) fared equally well in the grilling process: tender, with the flavor sharpened by the wood smoke and enhanced by a mild, chunky avocado salsa. This combined well with another choice from the "sides," a pair of grilled vegetable kebobs that mixed zucchini, onion and yellow peppers. The distinctive flavor of the tuna, too, was enhanced by the distinct grilled taste. It was well done outside and pink inside, as we requested, and was complemented by a rice pilaf that gained extra interest from a light touch of flaked coconut. Grilled dry diver scallops were compact, moist and peppery and served with a lemon herb butter sauce. They paired naturally with al dente linguine that was dressed with the same sauce and flecked with chopped parsley. Chef MacPherson told us that most of the fish is fresh from the market, but that some items are frozen so that they can be available consistently.
Desserts here are basic. A piquant, silky slice of key lime pie ($3.50) was the only non-ice cream confection available. The freezer offered a good selection of high-end ice cream bars Starbucks, Haagen-Dazs and Butterfingers. We selected, in addition to the sophisticated pie, a chocolate-nut coated, Good Humor-style bar that perfectly capped off a meal every bit as good as Shore meals recalled from hot summer days. The Blue Fish Grill fills a niche for tasty, mostly healthful food at reasonable prices. The two Matts envision a time when they will open more outlets based on this concept.

